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Learn how to
edit text files
with a text editor

Learn Enough Text Editor
Developer Fundamentals
02

Learn Enough Text Editor to Be Dangerous is designed to help you learn to edit plain text files using a text editor, arguably the most important tool in the software developer’s toolkit. Unlike other text editor tutorials, which are typically tied to a specific editor, this tutorial is designed to introduce the entire category of application—a category many people don’t even know exists.

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Learn Essential Skills

In the Text Editor Tutorial

Text makes the world go ’round

See the power of raw text editing

Plain text is one of the most important kinds of computer data. It makes up World Wide Web pages, computer source code, system configuration files, and more. The tool used to edit plain text files is called, appropriately enough, a text editor.

Unlike other text editor tutorials, which are typically tied to a specific editor, this tutorial is designed to introduce the entire category of application—a category many people don’t even know exists. Moreover, editor-specific tutorials tend to be aimed at professional developers, and generally assume years of experience, but Learn Enough Text Editor to Be Dangerous doesn’t even assume you know what a “text editor” is.

To be productive with text editors, you don’t have to know everything about them—you just have to learn enough to be dangerous.

VIM: the classic text editor

Edit text anywhere there is a command line

Everyone should learn how to use at least one text editor, and Learn Enough Text Editor to Be Dangerous teaches you at least two! You’ll start by learning Minimum Viable Vim, an introduction to the powerful, ubiquitous, and extraordinary Vim editor. Vim is available on virtually every computer system in the known universe, so learning a little Vim means having a way to edit text no matter where you end up going.

A modern editor

It's more than an ugly word processor

Next, you’ll learn the common features of so-called “modern” text editors, with a focus on the free and open-source Atom editor but with skills transferable to many others. Learn how to move around (potentially large) text documents; cut, copy, and paste content; and find and replace text. These are useful for performing operations in seconds that could take hours by hand.

Advanced moves

Features and tools to increase efficiency

Finally, you’ll learn advanced techniques like tab triggers, which allow the almost miraculous creation of otherwise repetitive content. You’ll also learn how to full projects, navigating quickly from one file to the next and even finding and replacing through hundreds of files at once.

The result of learning enough text editor to be dangerous is proficiency with the essential tool for editing the most common and important data format in the world.

Is all of this…

Sounding good?

Happy people

saying nice things!

Jimmy Wales
Founder, Wikipedia

Q: What is Jimmy Wales' favorite book?

A: It changes often. At the moment, it’s Ruby on Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl. :)

About the
Text Editor Tutorial

This is a strong introduction into Text Editor usage for programming. By the end of it you will have a base knowledge to be able to utilize the various text editors available, and be informed enough to know if this is something more that you want to pursue.

— viper941

I would recommend it for the novice as it provides a very quick but comprehensive overview of the 3 different categories of editors i.e. well established editors (vim, EMACS), modern editors (Sublime Text, Atom) and cloud editors (c9). The book provides enough detail to comfortably start using both vim and Atom.

In addition, I think it would be useful for people who have been using editors for years. As some one who has grown up with vim and eclipse-based IDE editors for code development, Michael’s very informative book was excellent in motivating me to start using Atom again.

I had toyed with cloud editors before, but this book motivated me to try the c9 editor.

Most importantly, I found the book fun to read, educational and useful straight away.

— Amazon Customer

This is a great book as an intro to text editors in coding. In Learn Enough Text Editor to Be Dangerous, Michael Hartl has a unique approach, emphasizing core principles and technical sophistication, rather than rote learning. All the Learn Enough series tutorials share this approach in a way that makes them consistent yet complementary, not repetitive. Each of the skills in the series touches on and supports the others, but all are complete by themselves.

— Jacob Rale

I stumbled upon your website by luck a couple weeks back and since then I have gone through the Developer Fundamentals series, which I have to say exceeded my expectations and filled in many gaps in my knowledge which multiple other online tutorials failed to do.

— Tayyab I.

I've done a lot of programming tutorials and I just want to commend @LearnEnough's intro tutorial (text editor, git, terminal, HTML) for showing how to make a website and publish it to the world. None of the other tutorials have made it "click" like this one. Thanks guys. pic.twitter.com/1hQvaTWQdt

About the
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I must say, this Learn Enough series is a masterpiece of education. Thank you for this incredible work!

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Just bought the new ebook and want to say keep up the great work!! The Learn Enough to Be Dangerous series re-ignited my desire to code after 10+ years of “meh”.

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The Learn Enough Society and the courses are incredible. It’s the best value in the market of online courses in my opinion. Like you say, it’s learning to tech, which is very useful in our world.

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I just meant to tell you: your tutorial books from the Learn Enough series are awesome! The books are well-written, clear, concise, super-useful, and even fun to read. Thank you so, so much for this! I have bought the first three and will buy whatever you publish next. Keep up doing this very good work and thanks again.

— Pierre W.

Have been following the whole “Learn Enough to Be Dangerous” series and am VERY impressed with it. I am a project manager who works with software developers daily. These sessions have provided me with a huge amount very useful information, to the extent that I now not only understand what the dev guys are talking about, but am starting to use the tools (command line, Git, etc.) that they use.

— Brian

Michael Hartl is one of the best educators around when it comes to web development. I have been following him for a long time, and everything he produces is top quality. If you are looking for a quick way to become a thorough and productive professional web developer, Hartl’s books are a great place to start.

— Abram Bailey

Also - if you are working through @RailsTutorial you will probably check out @LearnEnough quite soon, which is an incredible resource for people starting out. Same high quality as the rails tutorial, while still digestible for people starting out.

Hi, my name is Philip, and I’m a beginning learner of web development. I’ve dabbled in small ways in Ruby/Rails for about a year and a half. Occasionally, I write ruby scripts to solve problems at my job. I also dabble in learning: JavaScript, Ember, more Ruby/Rails, brief intro readings into Scala.

I’ve tried Codeschool, Codecademy, and I’ll stop there, so you don’t spend the next 3 hours reading all the different learning resources I’ve tried.

Ruby on Rails Tutorial (Rails 5) is undoubtedly, the most effective and educational resource I’ve ever come across when it comes to learning anything about web development or writing any code on any level.

Here’s what you seem to understand that everyone else just gets wrong:
There’s a big spectrum between the very beginner basics: declaring variables, to voodoo, magical, incantational trickery of witchcraft, like building your own web server.

Almost all tutorials make this mistake. The first couple “lessons” are good for people who don’t even have a clue what computer programming is and then suddenly, there’s a big jump to what seem to be concepts that only seasoned developers have mastered.

Thanks for such a great, educational guide in Ruby on Rails.

— Philip

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